High Park fire survivor Gyorgy Vidacs, 84, died Wednesday night in a tent pitched near the charred ruins of his Rist Canyon home.

Vidacs was one of hundreds of people who lost their homes this summer in the High Park fire. The charismatic Hungarian immigrant was the first to attempt to rebuild his home of more than 50 years immediately after mandatory evacuation orders were lifted by the Rist Canyon fire department.

Friend and former coworker David Harris
took Vidacs into his family’s Fort Collins home after Vidacs was ordered to leave his neighborhood.

“George (as his he was called by everyone who knew him), was just like family — as close as you can be without being blood,” Harris said.

The first thing on Vidacs’ agenda after losing his home was to build it again, Harris said.

Though he would have been 85 in October, Vidacs had plenty of youthful energy, a healthy family history and an unwavering will to recreate what he had lost.

Vidacs began by trying to construct a small wooden shed to hold his tools. The project stalled, however, when Larimer County officials ordered him to stop because he had no building permit, Harris said.

Although he was welcome in Harris’ home any night, Vidacs would camp on his property occasionally. Typically, he would call when he wasn’t coming home.

But on Wednesday, no call came. Thursday morning, Harris was notified that his friend had been found dead.

The Larimer Country coroner confirmed Vidacs suffered a heart attack Wednesday night and died quickly on his land.

“If George could have been faced with the decision ‘Where do I want to die,’ given the circumstances — that land meant so much to him, he fought so hard to acquire it — that would have been it,” Harris said.

Vidacs had no family in the U.S., but he was embraced by his community.

“Everybody was utterly stunned,” Harris said. “Nobody had it tuned in on their dial as something that might happen.”

Edie Hopkins-Dahlgren, one of the owners of Cafe Bluebird in Fort Collins, helped to organize a fundraiser for Vidacs in August where nearly $7,000 was raised.

“A lot of the restaurants here in Fort Collins had decided to (work) through the Red Cross to broadly reach out to the High Park victims,” Hopkins-Dahlgren said. “We had a close connection with George and we felt like we wanted to help one victim a little more specifically.”